The Next Page—and the One After

What keeps readers turning pages, and why do you care? The first answer is complicated, the second simple. Without enthusiastic momentum, your reader—whether agent, publisher, or audience—is gone.

Happily, there’s more than one way to keep those fingers moving, because each reader turns pages for slightly different reasons. Here are some possibilities:

~ Suspense

This asset occurs frequently, because many readers and writers associate the novel with impassioned curiosity about what’s next. The supremacy of plot is somewhat genre dependent. Still, whatever your style or subject, don’t skimp on this expectation. Every genre needs some sort of tension on every page.

~ Characterization

Re-examine To Kill  Mockingbird, and its rather antiquated style might dismay you.  Why, then, do so many people list it as their most favorite ever? Few kids rival Scout’s gloriously naive sense of right and wrong. The same might be said of her extremely mature dad. Create characters one can’t forget, and readers will sigh when there are no more pages to turn.

~ Scenario

What do the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series share in common? A wide range of people respond to mystery, underdogs, resourcefulness, and archetypes. Of course it rarely makes sense to replace the scenario that calls to you with a more marketable one. But it makes terrific sense to add heft, originality, danger. Can you make the Concept bigger? More enticing?

~ Emotions

Unless your characters experience them deeply, your readers won’t experience them at all. Yet belabor or “tell” about feelings, and readers still won’t respond. Emotions are concrete, dynamic responses to reality. Present them that way.

~ Secrets

Who doesn’t love them? But if we know too much or little, those whispers can irritate more than intrigue. It never hurts to map out how and when you dispense your novel’s secrets.

~ Humor 

Whether or not your novel is a comic one, exploit every opportunity for laughter, including the bleak irony of tragedy.

~ Poetry

Some novelists write so beautifully that we want more and more and more. At least occasionally, join them.

~ Intellectual curiosity

Those interested in classical music, RNA, or history can’t wait to see what Richard Powers will teach them on the next page of The Gold Bug Variations. What’s your audience curious about?

Whether drama, originality, voice, insight, or point of view, there’s more than one way to keep readers losing sleep and missing calls because they can’t put your book down.

Tip:  Know, internalize, and use your best tricks to keep the pages turning.

Why Blame a Duck for Not Being a Loon?

It’s not the sparrow’s fault it’s not a cardinal. Nor the mallard’s that its plumage is drab, its flight uninteresting, and its call pedestrian. Neither is it fantasy’s fault that it offers wizards, nor literary fiction’s that if you read quickly and carelessly, you might miss the whole point. 

Ducks are as admirable as any other water fowl. They’re worthwhile even if you drove to Wisconsin’s North Woods for loons and eagles. Know how to find the bird you want. That also applies to the novel you want to read—or write.

Tip: Immerse yourself in your genre so you can fulfill reader expectations.

~ Familiarize yourself with conventions.

• In your genre, do readers tolerate some “telling,” or hardly any at all?
• How much backstory will your readers accept/want?
• Do readers expect a sex scene, and how graphic can it be?
• Are long, complex sentences part of the pleasure—or the diminishment of it?
• When does theme become intrusive, or is it nearly as crucial as the story itself?

~ Write to an ideal reader.

• Can you explicitly identify your audience?
• Can you picture the person seeking the precise book you want to write?
• Are you entertaining, moving, scaring, pleasing, charming this individual? That’s a great way to test the aptness of your prose.

~ Heed relevant feedback.

• Do your critiquers resemble your potential audience, and if not, can they objectively assess YA, westerns, mysteries, or whatever you’re writing?
• Do you pay special attention to suggestions geared toward your intended audience and less attention to those that seem irrelevant or subjective?
• Can you be scrupulously honest about what’s irrelevant or subjective?

~ Write toward realistic goals.

• If you crave public acclaim more than personal satisfaction, do you have a big Concept? A marketable scenario? A plan for landing an agent and a publisher?
• Are you honest about why you’re writing? After all, if only a loon will satisfy you, don’t look for one in New York City.

Happily, many motives drive novelists, and no two readers want exactly the same book. Write from your heart, and know whose heart you want to touch. Proceed thoughtfully and relentlessly. That’s the path toward the call you seek, whether from waterfowl, agent, or publisher. You just have to try realistically—with open eyes.

Reality for the Writer: Verisimilitude for the Reader

What’s easy about being a fiction writer? You need a marketable “concept” that “captures the reader’s or viewer’s imagination, excites their senses, gets them asking ‘what if,’ and sparks them to start imagining the story even before they have read a word.” – Jeff Lyons

Then after completing a novel executing that concept, you still need an agent, marketing plan, publisher, maybe a publicist. How do you keep one foot in the marketing world, and the other in the one your imagination built? A smidgen of reality facilitates all those challenges:

~ Admit your goals.

Which matters more: the book you long to write, or its publication? If the latter, don’t write chick lit after its time has passed. Don’t invent a revolutionary point of view or have sixteen protagonists. Be honest about what you want to facilitate achieving it.

~ Put a beautifully-shod foot forward.

Agents—and readers—appreciate not just Concept, but quality. Don’t shop your book until the scenario is strong, the characters multi-dimensional, the tension high, the plot causal, and the writing musical. Plus whatever else makes your novel all it could be.

~ Persevere.

Hard as this is, you mustn’t take rejection personally. Agents have bad days and unfair biases. Publishers aren’t raking in dough. Readers have a zillion choices. Here, it’s not the early bird that gets the worm, but the bird that tried over and over and over. And over.

Tip: Stupid as it sounds, you need realistic goals and a realistic strategy for accomplishing them.

That’s the writer part. What about the reader part?

Fiction is far less about reality than a simulation of it that imposes greater credibility, causality, and morality than daily life. As Mark Twain put it, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”  What to do?

~ Eliminate coincidence.

            

If it happened, we must accept it. In fiction? Not so much. Perhaps not at all!

~ Make us believe.

Lauren Groff notes, “as a writing teacher of mine once said, very gently, to a student who handed in work formed out of the rough stuff of her life, ‘That it happened doesn’t make it true.”  The novelist must make it seem true—with all the complexity and effort that entails.

~ Grant justice.

Who wants bad guys winning and good ones losing? That’s what the news is for.

Tip: Good fiction doesn’t re-create reality; it imitates it.

Opera for the Novelist?

Don’t enjoy listening to it? That’s fine. It’s an acquired taste—like blue cheese or the musty Indian spice Asafoetida. And yet regardless of your genre, goals, or commitment to gravitas, a taste of operatic idiosyncrasy might zestfully season your fiction. And you needn’t endure a single high-pitched note to apply these possibilities.

~ Passion.

Not just with a capital “P.” Rather, an entire word that’s capitalized in boldface. Consider Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. The Queen loves Essex (Devereux), who’s madly in love with his dearest friend’s wife. It can’t end well. Spoiler: it doesn’t. And this has to do with contemporary fiction because…

…the higher the stakes, then the better. Build Concept. Corner your characters.  Want your audience to feel passion? Escalate the tension. Escalate it even more.

~ Motif.

Many of the loveliest operas revisit musical themes. But exploring themes radically differs from merely repeating them. This concept functions the way a poet plays off the six central worlds that build the sestina form: each encounter differs at least slightly. Same with the scarlet letter in Hawthorne’s novel: always similar, never identical. That familiar yet new variation amplifies tension, resonance, and complexity.  Chillingworth, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Hester all view that letter differently—and thus readers do, as well. This is relevant to you because…

…the best fiction has texture. Layers of meaning emerge from words and symbols echoing off each other. And recurrent variations let the audience intimately connect your world with their own—the way years of varied encounters cement a friendship.

~ Climax.

People who adore opera rarely notice how long it takes the protagonist to die, while that’s the first thing people who dislike opera mock. Why must it take so long? Because a lot has gone into this ending. Why rush questions like who lives, rules the kingdom, gets revenge, and wins true love (usually no one). This relates to contemporary fiction because…

…big stories need big resolution. Consider proportion. If your scenario is low key, as many good ones are, then hurry up. But if you’ve posed huge dramatic questions, give your audience enough time to savor, wind down, exhale.

~ Theme.

It’s likely a good thing that we no longer fuss much about honor. But the ageless questions of morality, betrayal, hope, irony, and sacrifice matter to you because you’re a contemporary novelist. Those questions will be the crux of story—forever.

Tip: Fiction comes not only from the imagination, but the world. The more of the world you put in, then the more your readers will get out of the fictional world you create.

Scenario and “The Woman Upstairs”

The brilliance of Claire Messud’s novel, The Woman Upstairs, is taking the pain of a woman symbolically dismissed from view and using that to analyze the pain that an unnoticed person of either gender can endure. Who’s the woman upstairs, and what ticks her off?

Bertha Mason, the mysterious character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is a potentially dangerous madwoman in the attic. Messud handles the allusion so lightly that a reader can fully appreciate the novel without noticing the reference to Rochester’s first wife. 

But Messud brings new life to Bronte’s question: Is Mason dangerous because she’s a madwoman, or because cruelty and misunderstanding have reduced her to one?

Put “the woman upstairs” in a contemporary setting, and you can reveal the psyche of a woman treated as if she lacks merit, feelings—in fact doesn’t exist. Her purpose is fulfilling the needs of everyone else, constantly putting herself last, if she counts at all. In The N.Y. Times Book Review, Barbara Kingsolver observes that “A novel’s extraordinary power is to allow a reader to take possession of the inner life of another.” Messud accomplishes precisely that.

So why did this novel fare so poorly compared with Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch?  Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes) says, “The world doesn’t think what she’s doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.” But why? What’s behind the acclaim for a laborious book with a meandering plot and lots of stock characters versus an exquisitely written, deeply analytical one about individual pain representative of all human pain?

It’s all in the scenario. The Woman Upstairs attracts about as much attention as its protagonist, who tells us, “And especially now that I’ve learned that I really am invisible, I need to stop wanting to fly. I want to stop needing to fly.”  

The flight Nora Eldridge longs for is the equivalent of High Concept—the Big Idea that sells movies, books, and film options. If your scenario resembles an unnoticed person in hiding, its premise won’t help sell your book. What should you do?

Tip: Decide what really matters to you as an author.

If your heart’s in a winning scenario, you’re so lucky! But maybe your heart’s in writing something agents and critics might consider mundane. Then you must choose between writing the book you long to write or, instead, concentrating on making the sale. There’s no right or wrong answer here. However, you do need to be honest about what you choose, your rationale, and the probable consequences of your choice.

Because the truth is that the woman who wrote a brilliant novel got little recognition, and the woman who wrote one with a High Concept won a Pulitzer. The prose didn’t make the difference; the scenario did.

As Messud puts it, “When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first.”